Waterlogged

[message alert] – Taylor Bailey: Hey, it looks like Kacie just sent us a picture of something, but I can’t tell what it is.

It seems like it might be…wet?

Wait, there’s a caption too.

Hold on, it’s a canoe!

And it’s 1,200 years old?

– Nick Hoffman: 1,200 years old?

I hope she checked it for leaks before she stepped in.

– I don’t think she’s gonna get in it.

Cool!

Where is this?

– Kacie Lucchini Butcher: Super cool.

It was found in Lake Mendota.

We go there all the time.

I wonder if there are more canoes in the lake that haven’t been discovered yet.

Do you wanna go out on the lake and see if we can find out?

Meet me at the boathouse, and don’t forget your floaties!

– Kacie just said she wants to go on a boat to see if there is more.

Do you want to go check it out?

– I get a little seasick, so I think I’m gonna sit this one out, but let me know if you find anything.

– Ugh, I can’t see anything.

Do you think there are any boats even in this lake?

– Yes, definitely.

The picture that I showed you of the canoe, they said they got those canoes from this lake.

My guess is that if we wanna find any, we’re gonna have to get in the water.

– Kacie, it’s 38 degrees.

I am not getting in that water.

[message alert] – Ugh, fine.

Well, Nick did just text me and he said he knows where he can show us an old canoe.

What do you say?

Should we go meet him?

– I mean, if it’s warmer than this, let’s go.

– All right.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [TV static] – Hey, how’s it going?

– Bill Quackenbush: Hello there.

– These are the experts to talk about canoes.

This is Bill and Tamara.

– Hi, I’m Tamara Thomsen; I’m a maritime archeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society.

– I’m Bill Quackenbush; I work for the Ho-Chunk Nation, and I serve as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer.

– These are the people to tell us about the canoes.

– Can we look?

– Absolutely.

– Definitely, take a look.

– Kacie: Whoa.

So there’s a ton of water in here and the canoes are submerged in the water.

– Bill: And that’s the original dugout, the first one they took out.

And this is the second one that lays alongside it right here.

– Kacie: And the original one, the 1,200-year-old one is more intact.

It’s in a big, kind of, singular piece versus the older one is in a few more individual pieces.

– Tamara: Yeah, so it’s a little bit more fragile.

And if you were to touch this one, the 1,200-year-old canoe, feels more like a bagel.

So it’s hard on the outside and spongy on the inside.

And then the 3,000-year-old canoe feels like wet cardboard.

– The two canoes are from very different periods.

If we look at a timeline, here is the present day and here is where the younger canoe was built.

Pretty far back.

But now look at how far back the older canoe was made.

Notice anything?

Check out how big the difference is.

The younger canoe is closer in time to today than it is to the older canoe.

That’s pretty wild.

What can you tell us about how these two canoes were found?

– So I had spent time in museums looking at a variety of canoes.

So I knew what I was looking at, and I happened to be scuba diving in Lake Mendota June of 2021.

And where my buddy, my dive buddy stopped, was right above the exposed end of a dugout canoe.

So I got a notebook outta my pocket and I wrote, “I think that’s a dugout canoe.”

And then about the same thing happened in the spring of 2022.

I was out with a student and we ran into another dugout canoe, and it turns out it was a little bit older.

– Taylor: Wow.

– So we didn’t know how to scuba dive.

That was our first problem.

[all laughing] When the older canoe was made around 1000 B.C.E., the people living in the area were primarily hunter-gatherers.

This meant that they hunted animals, gathered wild plants and nuts, and fished or collected shellfish for food, although they may have also started to do some small-scale farming.

Archeologists call this the Archaic period of American Indian history.

When the second canoe was made, 1,800 years later, around 800 C.E., a lot had changed.

Archeologists call this the Woodland period.

People still hunted and gathered, but by now, farming was much more important to them.

Corn was planted and harvested, and there were some other big changes.

Hunters were now using the bow and arrow and people had started building burial or effigy mounds, big mounds of earth, often in the shape of an animal or a bird that appeared all across southern Wisconsin.

So while both cultures were making and using canoes, there were also a lot of really big differences in how people lived during those periods when these two canoes were made.

And what would they have used these canoes to do on the water?

– Dugouts, you know, they serve a purpose.

They have to float on the water, of course, maybe carry a small load for going out to either harvest fish or the young Indigenous of old, they’d be out there playing around, diving off just like you and I would, right?

So there was probably no end to the use of the dugouts along the shorelines of these lakes though.

– What were dugout canoes like these used for?

Traveling on water, of course.

But beyond that, is there anything we can say?

Well, dugout canoes were used across the Americas for thousands of years and had a variety of purposes.

Native peoples used them for traveling, fishing, transporting goods, recreation, and even whaling in some areas.

– Yikes, that’s more dangerous than I’m ready for.

Getting around by water could often be faster than traveling on land, especially if you were transporting a lot of goods.

And in some cases, travel by water was the only option.

So dugout canoes were likely a key part of life for many Native peoples.

– Yeah, we talk about our youth, you know, with items of this nature, the realization that their ancestors had made this themselves with their hands, that plays an important role of assuring that we pass on, you know, critical components of our culture within our own tribes even.

– The Ho-Chunk are one of the 11 federally recognized First Nations in Wisconsin.

To be federally recognized means the Ho-Chunk Nation, which has its own government, has a direct government to government relationship with the United States.

The canoes we looked at are so old that we don’t know as much about the people who made them as we do about Wisconsin’s current First Nations.

There are many Native nations and tribes who call this area home and whose ancestors could have left these canoes behind.

The Ho-Chunk’s oral traditions state that they have always been in the area where the canoes were found.

So for Ho-Chunk members like Bill Quackenbush, the canoes are a link to their oral traditions and history.

– How do people make dugout canoes hundreds or thousands of years ago all without modern tools?

And how do we even find this kind of thing out?

Unfortunately, nobody from way back left us detailed instructions.

This kind of specialized and technical knowledge was shared through oral teaching, that is, by word of mouth.

But even without written records, we can figure out some things by just looking closely and by reading things that later European explorers wrote when they first met Native peoples.

One account from the 1580s says Native people made their own canoes only with the help of fire, hatchets of stone, and shells.

Another writer from the same time gives more detail.

They noted that the canoe makers would start by setting one side of a tree trunk on fire, which would burn out the initial hole.

The writer notes, “When it hath burnt it hollow, they cut out the coal with their shells.”

So basically, they would burn part of the wood, scrape out the coal and ash to make a hollow part, and then burn and scrape more in places that needed to be deeper or wider.

If we look closely at some stone tools from Native peoples, we can even see traces of charcoal on them.

So basically, we’ve got two different types of evidence telling us how canoes were made even before iron tools were available.

Pretty ingenious.

– Recovering this, did you learn anything else about the landscape and environment of this area?

– Sure, we’ve been working with Bill out on the water actually, to kind of understand why these all ended up there and why they’re, you know, so concentrated in this one part of the lake.

– So when they first brought up the 1,200-year-old dugout canoe, there was a high interest in looking at the area there to see if there’s any other potential aspects that is conducive for village life.

And so the Historical Society has beautiful mapping process where they check out the layer of that lake at that layer back then.

And those flats that are on that area are where the villages of old would have been, you know, their shorelines of that too.

– So what did y’all think about the canoes?

– They were so cool.

I can’t believe that we have them, that they exist at all.

– It’s such an incredible reminder of our history.

It goes well before Wisconsin became a state in 1848.

We have a history that goes back millennia.

– Artifacts like the dugout canoes from Lake Mendota are a reminder that Native peoples have been living in the area that’s now Wisconsin for thousands of years.

Technologies like dugout canoes were one tool they used for transportation, fishing, and fun.

Today, Wisconsin is still home to many Native nations.

Who are your tribal neighbors today?

Do some research with your classmates to learn more.

You can also research to learn which nations made up Wisconsin at different points in history.

Ask a librarian or a teacher to help and then share what you’ve learned.

And the next time you’re out on a lake in Wisconsin, just think that more dugout canoes might be right below you, waiting to be recovered.

[all laughing] – Geez Louise!

– Help me put…

Put it back in my pocket.

[Taylor laughing] Boat safety.